"To adults, services like Facebook that may seem “private” because you can use privacy tools, but they don’t feel that way to youth who feel like their privacy is invaded on a daily basis. (This, btw, is part of why teens feel like Twitter is more intimate than Facebook. And why you see data like Pew’s that show that teens on Facebook have, on average 300 friends while, on Twitter, they have 79 friends.) Most teens aren’t worried about strangers; their worried about getting into trouble."

Jeff Jarvis' Public Parts, released September 27th and currently 12,098 in "books" on Amazon, has come under review by Evgeny Morozov. It is a rather singularly vicious review. From early on: "Why are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy advocates—'there is money to be made in privacy'—who are paid to mislead the 'netizens,' that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. On Jarvis’s scale of evil, privacy advocates fall between Qaddafi’s African mercenaries and greedy investment bankers. All they do is 'howl, cry foul, sharpen arrows, get angry, get rankled, are incredulous, are concerned, watch, and fret.' [...]

"Now we'll be giving you the ability to control who can see your friends and pages. These fields will no longer have to be public." -The Zuckbot has spoken: changes are being made in privacy settings on Facebook. For more entertainment, the conference call is archived here. ("Q (Nick Bilton, New York Times): What are yours plans for the upcoming location service? Will this create another backlash? A (Zuckerberg): We will try not to create another backlash.")

"A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law. [Senator Pat] Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies—including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission—to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant." —Maybe we're all better off without the Senate protecting our Internet privacy. UPDATE: Tech industry people get angry, Leahy kills the warrantless part, for now.

Misha Angrist, otherwise known as member four of the Personal Genome Project, has—along with Stephen Pinker and some other science-world luminaries—given permission for his entire genome to be published online. As a trained geneticist, he's more equipped to predict the direction and effects of DNA research than the rest of us. His new book, Here is a Human Being, ponders the implications of this kind of bioforensics for our culture at large, and also for those of us, like me, who've already opened this Pandora's box by subscribing to 23andme or one of the other personal genomics outlets. Will our information be kept private? [...]

The New York Times takes some time out to haul out the always-salient question "What Is Wrong With People On The Internet?" today, this time in a Styles piece by Taffy Broedesser-Akner that looks at the more vicious reactions she received to a Salon article she had penned on the PTSD she dealt with after the particularly violent birth of her son. The Salon story eventually resulted in pseudonymous Internet people taking time out of their days to tell her things like "Do us all a favor — don't have any more kids." Yeesh. So much for The New Niceness!

So all the apps that take and upload and store your address books (which is a lot of them!) are making changes to their apps! By… sort of vaguely notifying you that they are doing so. So… not by not doing that. For instance, Twitter: "In place of 'Scan your contacts,' we will use 'Upload your contacts' and 'Import your contacts.'" Ha! Good one. Because "upload" really means "we're going to store every phone number and address and name of everyone in your phone for 18 months." WELL? Once people started digitally "signing" that endless user agreement in iTunes without clicking through all 36 or 42 pages [...]

I know there are tracking bugs running on my computer because wherever I go on the Internet, I get identical ads. You probably do too! And you know why? Because you're the pig-trough at which Barry Diller's feeding, according to a review of secretly-installed web-tracking cookies that collect profiles for resale: "The top venue for such technology, the Journal found, was IAC/InterActive Corp.'s Dictionary.com. A visit to the online dictionary site resulted in 234 files or programs being downloaded onto the Journal's test computer, 223 of which were from companies that track Web users…. 'Whether it's one or 10 cookies, it doesn't have any impact on the customer experience, [...]

Matt Cherette is 25 and lives in Grand Haven, Michigan, about fifteen minutes from his parents' house. He traveled to New York in the second week of February and while he was here, he signed the paperwork for a job at Gawker.TV. He would be their night coordinator. This was an opportunity to actually get paid for the sort of diligent content repurposing that he's been doing for free, for years, on the LiveJournal-hosted gossip community Oh No They Didn't.

While he was in New York, he came to a party thrown by his new boss, Richard Blakeley, at Destination Bar, on Avenue A. The Tennessee-Vanderbilt game was [...]